In my company we're using webhdfs a lot. One of usage pattern is exporting files from hdfs to external systems which was done before webhdfs by calling 'hadoop fs -text' to local filesystem and then transferring to final destination. We're using 'text' because of storing data on hdfs in sequence files and our external systems can't read them. We find webhdfs very handy, particularly because of very little overhead for starting up compared to 'hadoop fs', so we made a patch to make datanode capable of doing 'text' via webhdfs. Though I think our usage pattern is hardly common, I still asking the community, is there any interest in such functionality.
SY, Nikita Makeev
